Jupiter Project jp-1 Read online

“Okay, okay,” Zak said, rolling his eyes. “Go ahead. Tramp the icy wastes with Yuri for the glory of the ISA. I’ll stay here and write terrible things about you in my diary and starve to death.”

  I gritted my teeth, thinking. I was nervous and jittery. A small voice was nagging me in the back of my mind. Don’t be a sucker, it said. It had some good arguments, too.

  But I knew, finally, what was right. So I went back to Vandez and volunteered again.

  “Look, we can’t all be like you,” I said to Zak, later.

  “Uh huh.”

  Zak wanted me to go out and see if any girls were around the base, just in case we’d missed any. To amuse him while I was gone, he said. “Didn’t you bring your tapes?” I asked him. “Just conjure up ol’ Rebecca. She’ll keep you delighted.”

  “Don’t knock her, kid,” he said, smiling cynically. “She’ll make me a buck yet.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, and went to sleep.

  I woke up that night, sweating.

  The dream had come back again. I’d thought it was gone for good, but no—my pajamas were soaked, my heart pounding. I was breathing in short, desperate gasps.

  And I was in that sun-bleached Costa Mesa schoolyard again. The two Chicano kids had backed me up against a wall. They were elaborately casual, chewing gum, sneaking amused looks at each other.

  “Smart kid. aren’t ya?” the biggest one said. He put his hand on my chest and gave me a light shove. I stepped back to keep my balance.

  My lip trembled. “I’m not slow, if that’s what you mean.”

  The big one looked over at his friend. “They always got somethin’ ta say. Little smartasses.”

  The second kid punched me in the shoulder. I moved back and felt the rough brick wall behind me. There were more Chicano kids behind these two now; a crowd was gathering.

  “He’s gonna fly off into space, too,” the big one said to the crowd. “Too good for us compres down here in the mud.”

  “I don’t see any mud here.” I said, my voice sounded weak and distant. “Just dust.”

  The big one whirled around, fists clenched, face reddening. “You’re always right, ain’t cha, kid? Mebbe you oughtta taste dust.”

  He hit me in the face. I felt something break in my nose. Somebody punched me in the side. Suddenly everybody was shouting. I tried to take a swing at someone, anyone. The big kid cuffed my fist aside and slapped me again, laughing. There was a buzzing in my ears.

  I tried to run. Something struck me in the stomach and I stumbled, reaching out. The crowd was all around me. They were thick and close and everywhere I turned arms pushed me away. They spun me around in a circle, taunting me, calling names.

  I struck out blindly. I was crying, begging them, throwing punches in a red mist that smothered me. I heard them jeering. Something smashed me hard in the stomach. I went down.

  The noise washed over me. Somebody kicked me and I felt a sudden stab of pain in my ribs. The dust clogged my nose. I choked.

  The world seemed to blur and drift away. I grunted, clawing at the dirt, and rolled over. The jeering was a hollow echo, an animal chorus.

  I felt a wetness on my lips. I licked at it, thinking my nose was bleeding. I felt a spattering on my face. Somewhere kids were laughing, jeering.

  I licked my broken lips again. Then I caught it: the warm, acrid smell. The stench of urine…

  “Matt! Hey, what’s the matter?” Zak was shaking me.

  I realized I must have been moaning, half-awake. I gulped and deliberately slowed my breathing. “An old nightmare.”

  “Must be pretty bad,” Zak said sympathetically.

  At that moment I really needed a friend. So I told him about it. I’d never mentioned it before, even to my parents. But this time it was worse than ever before. I felt as if I had to tell somebody.

  “Wow,” Zak said when I was finished. “That happened just before your family was selected for the Project?”

  “It’s my last clear memory of Earth. I was eight.”

  “The nightmare keeps coming back, huh? That explains a lot.”

  “Explains what?”

  “You’re known all over the Can as a monomaniac, a hustler. Working is your life, Matt. The psychers make you take time off, like the rest of us, sure. But even here on Ganymede—you were the one who got me into the Walker business, check? You’re always looking for a job, some way to distinguish yourself.”

  “Well, of course,” I said irritably. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all. But with you it’s a mania. You’ve got to succeed.”

  “Uh, maybe…” I began to feel uncomfortable.

  “Because if you don’t, you won’t become a JABOL staff member.” Zak paused, thoughtful. “You’ll be shipped Earthside. Back into that schoolyard in—southern California, wasn’t it?—with that zoo of welfare refugees. The heat, the dust, big guys picking on you…”

  “Aw, crap. Stop playing Young Freud.”

  “You don’t see it, do you? Ever wonder why you get so tense and irritable with Yuri?”

  “Because he’s a bastard!”

  Zak stared at me. “A big bastard, too, isn’t he? Lots bigger than you. A big kid,” he mused.

  “Get this.” I said intensely, “that guy doesn’t scare me. It’s only, sometimes…sometimes I get mad.” I paused for a moment. I didn’t want to talk about this any more.

  “Look. I’ve got to get some sleep.” I mumbled.

  “Okay,” Zak said noncommittally.

  I rolled over, face down into my pillow. Zak clicked off the light.

  But I didn’t get much sleep that night.

  The next morning I suited up and walked through the scattered buildings that make up the Ganymede base. The Walker was parked at the edge of the base: its mate was off on some other task.

  It stood on six legs and was six meters tall. The living quarters were in the bubble set on top. The bubble had big, curved windows facing in all directions, with an extra large one set in front of the driver’s seat. Beneath it, almost lost in a jumble of hydraulic valves and rocker arms, was the entrance ladder.

  The Walker was painted bright blue for contrast against the reddish-brown dirty ice of Ganymede. The antenna on top was green, for some reason I have never understood. Underneath the forward antenna snout was neatly printed Perambulatin’ Puss. Everybody called her the Cat.

  “Morning!” I recognized Captain Vandez’s voice even over suit radio. He and Yuri walked up to the Cat from the other side of the base. I said hello. Yuri made a little mock salute at me.

  “Well, you boys should be able to handle her,” Captain Vandez said. He slapped the side of the Cat. “The ole Puss will take good care of you as long as you treat her right. Replenish your air and water reserves at every way station—do not try to skip one and push on to the next, because you won’t make it. If you fill up at a station and then go to sleep, be sure to top off the tanks before you leave; even sleeping uses up air. And no funny business—stick to the route and make your radio contacts back here sharp on the hour.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Bohles?”

  “It seems to me I’ve had more experience with the Walker than Yuri, here, so—”

  “Well, more experience, yes. You have taken her out before. But Sagdaeff practiced all yesterday afternoon with her and I have been quite impressed with his ability. He is older than you, Bohles. I think you should follow his advice when any question comes up,” he said impatiently.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t say anything.

  Captain Vandez didn’t notice my deliberate silence. He clapped us both on the back, in turn, and handed Yuri a sealed case. “Here are your marching orders. Follow the maps and keep your eyes open. Good luck!”

  With that he turned and hurried back toward the base. He was a busy man with a lot to do. I supposed I shouldn’t be too mad if he relied on the older of us two—usually, the kid who has been around
a while longer can handle himself better. It was just that in this case I disagreed.

  “Let’s move it,” Yuri said, and led the way to the ladder. We climbed up and I sealed the hatch behind us.

  I was standing in the room that would be home for the next five days. It was crammed with instruments and storage lockers, except where the windows—ports, to use the right technical term—were. There were fiber optics in the floor so we could check on the legs. The sunlight streaming in lit up the cabin and paled the phosphor panels in the ceiling.

  Yuri and I shucked our suits and laid out the maps on the chart table. I took the driver’s seat and quickly went through the board check. The lightweight nuclear engine mounted below our deck was fully charged; it would run for years without anything more than an occasional replacement of the circulating fluid elements.

  “Why don’t you start her off?” Yuri said. “I want to study the maps.”

  I nodded and slid over to the driver’s place. I clicked a few switches and the board in front of me came alive. Red lights winked to green and I revved up the engine. I made the Walker “kneel down” a few times—that is, lowered the bubble—to warm up the hydraulic fluids. It’s hard to remember that the legs of the Cat are working at temperatures a hundred degrees below freezing, when you’re sitting in a toasty cabin, but it can be dangerous to forget.

  While I was doing this I looked out at the life dome rising in the distance. I could pick out people sledding down a hill and further away a crowd in a snowball fight. A scramble like that is more fun on Ganymede than on Earth; somebody a hundred yards away can pick you off with an accurate shot, because low gravity extends the range of your throwing arm. We don’t have anything really spectacular on Ganymede in the way of recreation—nothing like the caverns on Luna, where people can fly around in updrafts, using wings strapped to their backs—but what there is has a lot of zip. For a moment I wished I was out there, in that isolated Earthlike environment, tossing a snowball, instead of piloting a Walker up to the ice fields. I mulled over what Zak had said last night. Then I cut the thought short; it was too late to back out now.

  I engaged the engine and the Cat lurched forward. The legs moved methodically, finding the level of the ground and adjusting to it; the gyros kept us upright and shock absorbers cushioned our cabin against the rocking and swaying.

  I clicked on the Cat’s magnetic screen. The dome area has buried superconductors honeycombing the area, creating a magnetic web. As the Cat left the fringes of that field, we needed more protection from the steady rain of energetic protons. They sleet down on Ganymede from the Van Allen belts. A few hours without protection would fry us. Cat’s walls contain superconducting threads carrying high currents. They produce a strong magnetic field outside, which turns incoming charged particles and deflects them.

  I took us away from the base at a steady thirty klicks an hour; it would be slower when we hit rough country. The morning sun came slanting in as we moved along the eastern rim of the valley; I switched on the polarizers in our windows to keep down the glare. Puss cast a shadow like a marching spider on the slate-gray valley wall.

  Maybe I should explain about morning on Ganymede. It’s a complicated business. The hardest thing to adjust to when you first land here is the simple fact that Ganymede is a moon, not a planet. It’s tied to Jupiter with invisible gravitational apron strings that keep it tide-locked, one face toward Jupiter, always. Meanwhile it revolves around Jove and in turn the Fat One orbits around the sun. The situation is pretty much the same as the Earth-Luna system: Luna shows the same face to Earth and revolves around it in about twenty-eight days, so the lunar “day”—one complete day-night cycle—is twenty-eight days long. Ganymede revolves around Jove in a fraction more than a week, so its “day” is seven Earth days long; the sun is in the sky three and a half days, every week.

  This makes a pretty complicated week, believe me. The base has legislated that sunrise occurs at Saturday midnight; it’s arbitrary, but it makes for a symmetric week and symmetry is like catnip to scientists. We were starting out Sunday morning and the sun would be in the sky until Wednesday afternoon.

  All this time Jove squats square in the middle of the sky, like a striped watermelon. At the moment the sun was streaming through the ports of the Cat and I had to polarize them to cut the glare. Yuri looked up from his map and said, “By the way, that little maneuver back there didn’t slip by me.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb. I heard you try to talk Vandez into putting you in charge. It’s a good thing he saw through you.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It seemed to me as long as you didn’t know much about a Walker you shouldn’t be running one.”

  “What is there to know? I picked up all I need in a few hours. Here, get out of the seat.”

  I stopped the Cat and, Yuri slid into the driver’s chair. We had reached the end of the valley and were heading over a low rise. Here and there ammonia ice clung to the shadows.

  Yuri started us forward, staying close to the usual path. The whole trick of guiding a Walker is to keep the legs from having to move very far up and down on each step. It’s easier for the machine to inch up a grade than to charge over it.

  So the first thing Yuri did was march us directly up the hill. The legs started straining to keep our cabin level and a whining sound filled the air. The Cat teetered, lunged forward, stopped and died.

  “Hey!” Yuri said.

  “You shouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “She’s just doing what any self-respecting machine does when it’s asked to perform the impossible. She’s gone on strike. The automatic governor cut in.”

  Yuri said something incoherent and got up. I took over again and backed us off slowly. Then I nudged the Cat around the base of the hill until I found the signs of a winding path previous Walkers had left. Within fifteen minutes we were in the next valley, its hills lit with the rosy glow of the sun filtering through a thin ammonia cloud overhead.

  Chapter 7

  We made good time Sunday. I did most of the driving. Yuri gradually picked up the knack of guiding the Cat—I suspected Captain Vandez had him practice only on flat, even ground around the base the day before. The Captain was a spaceman, after all, and groundhog work wasn’t his piece of pie.

  We slept overnight in the shadow of a thin, tall peak widely used as a landmark; the map called it Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars.” The first time I heard that it sounded a little silly, until I noticed that the peak looks something like a rocket from a distance, if you squint your eyes a little.

  Before we turned in for the night I located the way station that was our destination, and camped us next to it. The station wasn’t much: just an automatic chemical separator and a set of sampling devices. The chemical plant is vital. It collects water frost that condenses on its outstretched plates—usually a pint a day. The water is automatically stored. Whenever a Walker comes by the driver hooks up his air and water tanks to the station’s water reserves and replenishes his supplies.

  Where does the station get the air? That’s the trick: water is hydrogen and oxygen, so if you could break it up and throw away the hydrogen gas, you would have all the breathable oxygen you need. The Walker does just that—it passes an electric current through water to vaporize it, and then bleeds off the oxygen.

  Air isn’t just oxygen; the first spacemen found it a lot safer to use a lot of inert nitrogen, too, to keep down the risk of fires. The station extracts nitrogen from the ammonia in the ice all around it, automatically, and has it ready to mix with the oxygen.

  Before we bedded down I connected the air and water hoses from the Walker, clicked a toggle switch on the control board over to FILLING MODE, and forgot about it.

  Monday morning the sun was a third of the way across the black sky and Jupiter’s banded crescent resembled a Cheshire cat’s grin. Yuri fixed a quick-heating breakfast and we set out.

  Our route now ran due north. We wove
through wrinkled valleys of tumbled stone and pink snowdrifts, keeping an eye open for anything unusual. We were heading for the edge of the “tropical” zone of Ganymede—the belt around the equator where the rock is exposed. Beyond that band lie the blue ice fields. The temperature drops steadily as you leave the equator. If the Walker would take us that far (and if we were crazy) we could have found mountain passes near the north pole nearly two hundred degrees centigrade below freezing.

  Slowly, steadily, man is pushing the “tropical” zone toward the poles. Ganymede is warming up.

  We avoided the areas near the fusion plants. The big reactors throw out heat and gas at an enormous rate. The ice around them melts and forms churning rivers. The warm water carries heat to neighboring areas and they start melting, too.

  There’s a limit to the method, though. If you’re not careful, your fusion plants will melt their way into Ganymede and get drowned. Ganymede is a big snowball, not a solid world at all. It’s mostly water. There’s an ice crust about seventy klicks thick, with rock scattered through it like raisins in a pudding. Below that crust Ganymede is slush, a milkshake of water and ammonia and pebbles. There’s a solid core, far down inside, with enough uranium in it to keep the slush from freezing.

  So the fusion plants don’t sit in one place. They’re big caterpillars, crawling endlessly outward from the equator. Their computer programs make them seek the surest footing over the outcroppings of rock—only they run on tracks, not feet. We saw one about midday, creeping over a ridgeline in the distance, making about a hundred meters in an hour, sucking in ice and spewing an ammonia-water creek out the tail. It carried a bright orange balloon on top. If it melts its surroundings too fast and gets caught in a lake, it will float until a team can come to fish it out.

  Given half a century, they’ll give us a thick atmosphere and burn away the toxic gases. Another twenty years and there will be Earth-style air and crops and people on Ganymede. I might live to see that—or maybe by that time I’ll be in a Walker on Titan. Saturn’s huge moon.

  Not that Ganymede was all that cozy now. Our cabin heater ran constantly to fight off the chill that seeped in. Halfway through Monday morning we stopped in a narrow valley and I suited up; the sensor package I had to check out was a klick away, halfway up the side of a hill. The path was too dangerous for the Walker.